Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Guest Column
. .
ORD OF NEW intellectual dovolopment' tenW. io ttavel indi
ectly,like gossip. Soon,more and more people feel the need
Chicago, is the author ofThe to know what the reai story is: they want manifestos,bibliographies,expla
nations. When a journal does a �p�cial issue or commissions an editorial
Anatomy of National Fantasy:
coinment,it is often responding to this need.
Hawthorne,Utopia,and Every
We have been invited to pin the queer thed iy tail on the donkey. But here
day Life (U of Chicago P, l99i)
we cannot but stay and make a pause,and stand half amazed at this poor
and of essays on citizenship, donkey's present condition. Queer theory has already incited a vast labor of
sexuality, identity, and the pub metacommentary,& _virtual industry: special issues,sections of journals,om
lic sphere. She is a coeditor nibus reviews, anthologi�s,and dictionary entries. Yet the term itself is less
of Critical Inquiry and Public . than five years old. Why do people feel the need to introduce,anatomize,
and theorize something that can b!!fely be said yet to exist?
Culture. MICHAEL WARNER,
The critical mass of queer work is.more a matter of perception than of
associate professor of English·
volume. Queer is hot. This perception arises partly from the distortions of
at Rutgers University, New
the star system,which allows a small number of naines to stand in for an
.
Brunswick, is. the author of Let evolving culture. Most practitioners of the new queer commentary are not
ters of the Republic; Publi�ac ·faculty members but graduate students. The association with the star sys
tion and the Pubiic Sphere in. tem and with graduate students makes this work the object of envy,resent
Eighteenth"Centilry Amer ica ment,.and suspicion. As often happens,what makes some people queasy
Literatures of America (Rout queer criticism that tried to think through theoretical problems rigorously,
ledge, /996).
343
344 Guest Column
often by way of psychoanalysis. But the notion that this work belonged to
"queer theory" arose after 1990, when AIDS 'afidqueer activism provoked
intellectuals to see themselves as bringing a queerer world into being. Nar�
rating the emergence of queer theory was a way to legithnate many exper
iments, relatively fe� of which stilllooked like theory in the sense of
rigorous, abstract,·metadistiplinary debate.
We do not wish to use this editorial to define, purify, puncture, sanitize, or
otherwise entail the emerging queer commentary. Nor are we looking to fi:k
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our seal of approval or disapproval on anybody's claim to queerness. We
would like to cultivate a rigorous· and intellectually generous critical culture
without narrowing its field. We want to prevent the reduction of queer the
ory to a specialty or a metatheory.
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.! We also want to frustrate the already audible assertions that queer theory
has only academic-which is to say, dead-politics. Begimiings take a long
time, and uneven developments are often experienced as premature deaths, a
subject on which queer work is sadly expert. Because almost everything that
can be called queer theory· has been n1dically anticipatory, trying to bring a
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world into being, any effort to summarize it now will be violently partial.
Is this editoriai corllm.ent; then; queer theory? After all, PMLA is not a
'queer space in any sense. We are not proposing to queer PMLA, and we
could not perform such a change by willing it. Nor can we act as native in
formants, telling a presumptively straight assembly of colleagues some-
thing about whatqueers are; do, and think. . . .
world. governing both policy and everyday life. W hile to many these
spheres are separate, in queer thinking they are one subject. Queer com
mentary has tried to challenge some major conditions of privacy, so that
shame and the closet would be understood· no longer as isolation chambers
butas the architecture of common culture, so that vernacular performances
would no longer stammer with the ineloquence of tacit codes, bart<ly self-
. acknowledged, and·so that questions of propriety and explicitness would no
longer be burdened by the invisible normativity of heterosexual culture.
Amalgamating politics and feeling in a way that requires constant syncretic
gestures and movements, queer commentary has tried to drive into visibility
both the cultural production of sexuality and the social context of feeling.
We: acknowledge that a lot of work in queer studies has no explicit in
terest in making publics. Many critics equate the erotic and the political,
arguing that power is absorbed into the subject through the Symbolic order.
Queerness becomes.a question of identification. Much work in queer stud
ies equates cultural politics with politics itself, bracketing or deferring .
the question of how oppressions and sublimations around sex and sexual
ity meet up with. other kinds of violence and oppression-with exploita
tion, racial formation, the production of feminine subjectivity or of national
culture: We suggest that. what brings these different kinds of criticism
together as queer theory is a desire to create new contexts, and not just
professional ones .in which cool work can be performed. Criticism need
not have a certain kind of political content to shiue the aim of making
the world queerer. Making these· linkages theoretically and politically
is difficult. And many of the projects that are driven by queer aspirations
may look partial; seen collectively,.they are part of a broader and longer
term set of transformations.
If queer commentary were expected eitherto master or to adjudicate "the
politics" ofa developing critical culture, it would.be condemned to the fail
ure of mere theory or to the resentfulness of a critique that could not use
fully be heard. One of the stresses on queer intellectuals in the academy is
that there are few queer intellectual publics outside it Like the mainstream
.. :straight press,. the• organs of the national gay press-in particular, the Advo
' cate, Out, Deneuve; Ten Percent+-have been either oblivious or hostile to
queer theory. (Exceptions to this ti"end'are On Our Backs and Girlfriends.)
And even.inside'the academy, questions about queer theory's political util- .
. ity are occasionally not in the best faith. Sometimes they serve to ward off
theory from a model of gay studies.that has a more affirmative relation to its
·imagined constituency. In this context, queer commentary provides exactly
what some fear it will:.perspectives and archives to challenge the comforts
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of privilege and unself-consciousness.
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Sometimes, though, the •questions of political utility arise from a real
sense of political need. We have been .asked, for example, "What does ·queer
I
theory teach us about twelve-step programs?" "the power of new markets?"
. . "spirituality?"
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What does queer theory teach us about x?
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348 Guest Column
When a new thing emerges, people want to know how it is going to solve
problems. When it is called theory, itis expected to produce a program, and
when the theory addresses the broad issue of queerness, the program is ex�
pected to explain queer life. But queer theory has not yet undertaken the kind
of general description of the world that would allow it to produce practical
solutions. People want to know what costs, risks, and tactics are involved in
getting from this order of things to a better one. Asked for these reasons, the
question ofx i� both a.challenge and a hope. And it is a hard question.
The question of x might be more ordinary in disciplines that have long
histories ofaffiliation with the state. Sociology, psychology, anthropology,
and political science, for example, have earned much of their funding and
expert authority by encouraging questions of utility. Queer theory has flour
ished in the disciplines. where expert service to the state has been least fa
miliar arid where. theory has consequently meant unsettlement rather than
systematization.. This failure to systematize the world in queer theory does
not mean a commitment to irrelevance; it means resistance to being an ap
paratus for falsely translating systematic and random violences into normal
.states, adrniriistrative problems, or minor constituencies.
Sometimes the question of what queer theory teaches us about x is not
about politics in the usual .sense but about personal survival. Like feminist,
AfricimAmerican,Latina/Latino, and other minority projects, queer work
strikes its readers as knowledge central to living. This demand puts tremen
dous pressure on emerging work, pressure that makes the work simulta
neously conventional and unprecedented in the humanities and social
sciences�traditional insofar as pedagogy has long involved the formation
of identities and �ubjectivities, radical in the aspiration to live another way
now, here.
·What does queer theory.teach.us about x? As difficult as it would be to
spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has
the power to wrench frames.